The following is a raw transcript of an email from SHECKYmagazine.com columnist ADAM GROPMAN, in Aspen this week by virtue of having written and starred in a short film. We attribute any typos to high altitude. (Of course, the fact that we didn't correct them can't be attributed to high altitude, as we are currently residing in Southern New Jersey, at about 100 ft. above sea level. Our excuse? Sheer laziness.) Enjoy.

ADAM GROPMAN REPORTING FROM
THE U.S. COMEDY ARTS FESTIVAL

To: "Brian McKim/SHECKYmagazine.com" <editors@sheckymagazine.com>

Subject: more aspen

Date: Mar 12, 2006 12:44 AM

Wow! Let's see. There's so much more to tell since my first paltry report. Wednesday my short film/sketch group buddies and I went and saw 2 1-person shows in the venue called, quite appropriately, "The Tent", as it is a large rectangular tent in the town's central lawn made up on the inside to resemble a well-equipped, modern performance venue. It's got great lights, a generous stage, bars on both sides, a pretty good audio system and it holds over 300 people. The first half hour show was by a New York actress named Melissa Rauch and was called "The MIss Education Of Jenna Bush." Rauch came out as the president's hard-partying, good-time-gal daughter in this endearing, highly entertaining, almost bubbly show. The cute, perky Rauch did a killer Texas drawl and was seamless as she wove together W's ne'er do well progeny's mischievous, entitled, spunky and likable sides into a hyper-kinetic monologue to the audience about her sister, her Dad, boys, sex, drinking, partying, minorities, school and life in general. The setup was that Jenna just moved into a new apartment and was about to start her career as a school teacher. Condoleeza Rice sent her a blackboard as a present! The character is as chatty as Brooklyn housewife and about as politically incorrect as Jimmy Carter's brother Billy. But Rauch clearly has affection for this girl- a basically well intentioned, wide-eyed yet knowingly cynical daughter of power and prestige. And that's what makes it work. Rather than looking down on the character and shredding Jenna with a ruthless, broad caricature, she created a girl who's a jumble of weird contradictions and that despite her negatives, we wouldn't mind hanging out with and doing a few shots of Jack.

Veteran TV writer Rick Cleveland (West Wing, Six Feet Under) then came up on stage, sat at a desk bathed in cool, blue light and calmly, deliberately read from a bunch of pages as if he was a PhD student delivering his dissertation on literary comedy. His show was called "My Buddy Bill" and it had to do with the great 2-term president from the OTHER side of the red/blue divide. Basically, when he was writing for the West Wing, Cleveland got to meet Bill Clinton when the TV show crew visited the actual White House. Cleveland and Clinton hit it off in an odd moment of bonding over dog ownership. Bill was crazy about his dog Buddy and Rick had his much-loved pooch back at home in L.A. When Buddy pissed on the Oval Office rug, Rick gave Bill a little advice for dealing with the problem and the new found friendship was on. Cleveland took us through surreal visits by Clinton and his well-guarded motorcade to his house in L.A., for a trip to a nearby dog friendly beach and then an even weirder 4-person dinner with the Clintons and the Clevelands at a closed-down-to-the-public coastal L.A. restaurant.

Cleveland did a good job of recounting his extraordinary experiences in a taut, well-crafted, to-the-point way. His style was one in which every word counts, and in his case the words were well written. The Bill Clinton friendship took a bizarre and hilarious spin into a day of casual, 70's-esque hanging out in Arkansas with Cleveland, Bill, Bill's brother Roger and the actor Billy Bob Thornton, at Thornton's farm/music jam space. Cleveland even hit play on a tape recorder, which supposedly was blaring moments from the 4 of them jamming out to a Tom Petty song, with Bill doing a lame-assed sax accompaniment to the melody which could barely be called a "solo." This was followed by an even crazier, more unbelivable story of going to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam with Bill and the actor Christopher Walken and ending up in the famous Bulldog hash bar/cafe and getting wasted out of their minds, having candid, far-out conversation, and pigging out on egg salad sandwiches, fries with mayo and chocolate cake. I learned after the show that My Buddy Bill is totally based around factual events, but that Cleveland invented certain highlights and tittilating moments to kick the story up to an even higher level of entertainment. While it was all very funny, I kind of wish that it was all true. While we don't know WHICH parts were embelisshed, I have my strong hunches, and I can only say I wistfully wish I was still in the innocent, naive state of ignorance I was the moment the show ended, when I truly believed in my heart and my brain that our last Democratic president toked on a hash joint until he was mind-blowingly stoned, openly joked with other guys about banging Monica and blowing the chance while in office to bang Sharon Stone, and bitterly fought with Hilary at a dinner double-date like something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch. While I loved Cleveland's show, I guess I felt a little messed with insomuch that he tampered with the reality/fiction boundary line that most great 1-person shows stay pretty strictly on one or the other side of.

Our short film, "Insight Into The Enemy", had it's first screening, as part of the section called "Shorts 4", on Wednesday at 1pm. Almsot all the festival films were screened at the Isis Theater, a nice little 2-screen theater in the middle of Aspen, a few blocks away frojm the magnificent St. Regis Hotel, the headquarters, or "Death Star", if you will, of USCAF. The Isis is normally the local place where Aspenites see the smart, more indie-ish first run movies, but for this past week USCAF took it over with tons of special showings. At the Wednesday 1pm showing, the theater held around 100 people, which was about half full.

I was instantly impressed with the quality of the grouping we were in with. David Dean Bottrell's short "Available Men" was basically a very well written, executed and acted version of the classic "mistaken identity" / "blind date" themes we've seen before. But it was done so well and so smartly and had great actors like Jack Plotnik (all over your TV) that it won me over instantly.

The second short, "City Paradise", was a totally trippy, Monty Python-with-a-concusssion piece of work with tremendous visual production and a sense of whimsical absurdity. It combined real action elements with at least two kinds of animation to create an almost disturbing and yet delightful alternate reality like "Yellow Submarine" combined with "Eraserhead." What passed for a plot was a Japanese girl arriving in some London/Manchester England type city, pulling a fish tank out of her suitcase, getting sucked down under a Tube subway car into a murky sea inhabited by giant jellyfish and spending time practicing her English language tapes in her top floor UK flat while getting strange visits from grotesque, nonsensically speaking visitors at her front door. While there was no normal plot to speak of, the visual effects looked to cost around the same amount as, say, a nice house in Des Moines.

What was also pleasantly surprising was the impressive bigwig Hollywood talent connected to some of our fellow shorts. One 12 minute, real action piece called "American Storage" was executive produced by Judd Apatow (wrote "Cable Guy", co-wrote and directed "40 Year Old Virgin"), had Steve Carell in a medium sized role, Seth Rogen (one of the main characters in 40 y.o. Virgin) in a small role and David Krumholtz (TV's "Num3ers" and tons of other stuff) in the lead. To be honest, I was unerwhelmed with this film, as it underachieved on plot, comedic smartness and the intrinsic sense of dramatic honesty or import that make me care about characters and their predicament. The whole thing revolved around the zany characters who work in a large self-storage warehouse in L.A. The nearly-catatonic quasi-nerd who does the day-to-day shitwork for the joint discovers that an eccentric smartass (Krumholtz) has transformed one of the units into a groovy apartment and is living there. Put upon nerdy worker has to a.) get barraged by impish Krumholtz character's urbane, Five Easy Pieces-lite beatnik philosophy, b.) worry about his boss Carell coming back and canning his ass for letting a weirdo reside in a storage unit under his watch, and c.) summon the nerd courage to ask out the girl who works at the counter of said facility. It felt alot like a diluted, by-the-numbers work up of a "wacky", "Generation Y.5" (or whatever the hell the coveted, mostly male demographic for the Ferrell/Vaughn/Stiller/Wilson/Jack Black behemoth is called) idea that if merely multiplied in length by 9 (which gets you to a perfect comedy feature length of 108 minutes), and spiked with any two of the aforementioned current comedy stars, MIGHT yield a crazy huge cash cow monster at the multiplexes of America. But, unlike the tremendously written and hilariously acted "Wedding Crashers", and the mega-overhyped but at least conceptually compelling "40 Year Old Virgin", there was very little in this self-storage building milieu that seemed humanly relatable or based on universal conflicts, out of which even the craziest of comedy is almost always based.

But it was well produced, and the writer Brendan O'Brien, who I spoke with, seems like a great and down-to-Earth guy and knowing how incredibly hard it is to make ANY movie, let alone a great one, I wouldn't be suprised if he has some very good and funny scripts hit the silver screen in the future. And, of course, being a man of constant contradictions and one part Hollywood whore, I got a big kick out of our film being in the company of such undeniably huge, and often very funny talents.

Our short played 7th our of 8 in the group and it did not get the huge laughs that we were accustomed to and perhaps expecting. While reaction was almost never consistently huge for any of the shorts that day, I think we came in a little cocky and with flighty expectations because our short has generally killed in terms of audience response at viewings around L.A. What we kind of forgot was that the very strengths that our film possesses can appear to be shortcomings in a screening of this sort. We followed 6 highly produced shorts, some live action, some animated. A couple of the animated ones seriously looked as if they had tens-of-millions of dollars worth of high-tech production studios, massive computer consoles and Flame/Inferno digital effects machines behind them. One, called "Gopher Broke" looked like a Pixar or Disney release. It had a surprisingly old-school, little kid cartoon feel. It's credit roll had like 30 guys under EACH different technical section, so sophisticated and undoubtedly expensive was their production. And then came ours. Our short was done lean, mean and pretty quickly, although our director/editor Marc Leidy was still enough of a stickler to do 17 takes of one particularly subtle and important segment, and I'm glad he did because the attention to detail certainly paid off. Anyhow, our short looks exactly like a threatening terrorist video, one in which hooded Arab Muslim terrorists hold an American or European hotage- often with guns prominently displayed- and make menacing and beliggerent threats and denunciations against the United States, Israel and whoever else. When I say it looks real, I mean like we've heard that people at viewings have thought it was real and gotten upset, scared, and freaked out. Until, that is, the first outtake or "blooper sets in, abo"ut a half minute into it. If a person watches the entire 3 minutes, with the ensuing outtakes and madcappery that unfolds, and STILL thinks it's real, then they are either mentally retarted or just really really stupid. But just the fact that the occasional viewer will be terrified by the opening half minute or comment after seeing the whole piece how "real" and "scary" it was, leads one to understand how different a vibe our short puts up on the screen than the others!

The video is purposefully a little bit raw and has those horizontal pinstripes that cheap video shown on TV news always has. The blindfolded hostage looks realistically sweaty, scuffed up and silently terrified. And my Arabic gibberish is pretty goddamn spot-on. Also, our short actually works BETTER on a computer screen or TV set because it's made to fit that scale. That is where you WOULD see a terrorist video. The distressed look that Marc Leidy gave the film that is so beautifully effective on the small screen, was over-magnified and almost too messy around the edges when blown up on this gigantic movie theater screen. So while we got some laughs at the Wednesday show, we stupidly expected the "kill" and learned a quick lesson in having moderate expectatons and also in valuing and understanding the "silent laugh."

The silent laugh is a big phenomenon at the Aspen Festival. I'd heard that before from comedian friends who'd gone in past ears and really saw it for myself at some shows. On occasion, a comedian or sketch group that clearly was super-pro and delivering the high quality goods, would get much lighter laughs than you'd think 200 or 300 people would give. It seemed even more befuddling when a lesser act got BIGGER laughs earlier. Sometimes it was because the energy had shifted in the room and the crowd had become less fresh and red hot and more inward. Simple luck in the lineup. Sometimes it was because the crowd was industry heavy, and industry people are known for laughing and even envisioning lucrative artist contracts that they will present to the act up on stage, all inside their heads with not so much as a peep exiting their lips. Also, one must consider the Aspen factor. Aspen is a town or very small city of less than 10,000 year round almost completely full of national and international elites on a level with L.A.'s Bel Air, Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA., San Francisco's Nob Hill and The Upper East Side of Manhatan.

They are actually often a friendly bunch when you talk to them in the street or in the lobby of a comedy event. Really, we met some of the friendliest people among the Aspenites, generally older folks who had the absolute unmistakable, dead-on air of easy, breezy, faux-rugged WASPy (although I sensed that Aspen has a decent sprinkling of Jews as well?) inner and outer fulfillment that comes from living in a town where your neighbor will not only lend you the Grey Poupon, he or she will also probably lend you the 22 oz. imported Kobe filet mignon to go along with it, not to mention the Lear Jet, and the palatial beach house on Maui. Of course, if you are a distinguished Aspenite, you don't really need to borrow anything from your neighbor, because YOU are just as rich, perhaps richer!

We had Aspen locals bend over backwards to give detailed directions and recommendations to whatever it was we were looking for; volunteer help with Hollywood contacts THEY had, even while living in Colorado and not being in the entertainment industry; offer me a ride to the local hospital because my shoulder was killing from carrying around a 40lb. laptop bag and our castmate Kristin even had an older, seasoned-Malibu-blonde looking lady- who casually mentioned that she was 3 ex-husbands into life and "very rich"- offer Kristin to STAY in her house if she needed extra nights in town for the festival! I'm sure the 3 of us could have stayed there if we'd asked. Hell, she had a few extra bedrooms and probably would have enjoyed the vibrant young company.

So you see, Aspenites are a very amiable, welcoming and socially generous bunch, in that way that people are apt to be when they absolutely never feel threatened by dangerous rabble because no rabble ever makes it into their town. They're also not stressed because they're town was designed to feel like Martha's Vineyard in The Rockies, and they don't feel the bitterness of competition because a.) competetiveness is way too big-city and vulgar to even be involved with, b.) they're better and richer than you anyway, if you MUST push the issue, and c.) even if they themselves aren't, their ancestor 3 to 5 generations back definitely WAS! Now, these make for some very relaxing and refreshingly genial people to spend time around, especially when you add that subtle spice of Mountain saltiness and Wild Western, down home cowboy hattiness, that can be lightly slathered on like a lovely cologne or aftershave on the skins of ladies and gentlemen who's fleshly essence underneath is killer genius workaholic entrepreneurial shark, internatonal jet set quasi-ambassadorial ultra-educated dealmaker and extremely lucky descendant/wife/ex-wife of the formers. But these things do NOT necessarily make for an energetic, tsunami-of-laughter, explosively vocal comedy club crowd.

If you're doing good, solid mainstream club comedy,you probably want a late night working-class Chicago audience, a few pitchers of Old Milwaukee's Piss into the night. Now THAT is laughter. If you're doing hip, back-and-sides-of-the-room, literate, liberal smarty comedy, try Inman Square, Cambridge, or San Francisco, where the boys all want to be Weezer, James Frey (pre-liar) or Philip Seymour Hoffman and the girls all want to be Fiona Apple, Sarah Vowell or Maggie Gyllenhaal, but almost NONE of them actually write or perform. They all do graphic design, bartend or work for a "non-profit." They GET it, they DIG it, but they're not all trying to BE it, and by "It" I mean showbiz performer. Now the Aspenites are mostly not performers themselves, but they ARE older, more "refined" (read: got good stuff most of us can't afford), more buffered from life's jagged edges and itchy, frustrated resentments (i.e., what comes through in this essay when I describe Aspenites) and less generally desperate. Raw youthfullness, agitation, unease, frustration, resentment and desperation are golden ingredients for a good comedy cowd. Now sure, you might see generally well-manicured and educated crowds on occasion at a comedy club and they're laughing pretty well, but really, these kinds of miidle to upper middle class folks still have the frictious sensation of real life problems like: a sick baby at home, being overextended with the house mortgage, the struggle to make sure their town's public education is good enough for the kids, a tiring two-full-time-working-parents schedule and maybe even a vicious jerk at work in the next office that you simply have to deal with. Aspenites don't have these problems or these realities. So while they're watching a standup comedian or sketch show, they might be thinking "this is funny" but garrulously laughing isn't part of their repertoire. It's not their raison d'etre, if you will. Or perhaps the Aspenite is thinking: "This is delightful, this lively performance all full of vim and vigor. I can sense that there is some real passion and intelligence behind it. But I just don't understand what exactly it means and even if I did I'm not sure I really need to...or want to. It must be intended for those 'other people'. You know, the ones who don't live in Aspen"

So, what happens for many of the acts at Aspen, I think, is that the laughs they get can be out of sync with how effective their work is, what a silent industry person watching may think, and even how much the crowd en masse enjoyed the show. Now, for sure, not every time a performer gets soft laughs is it the crowd's fault. Even at the level of Aspen, performers make missteps or don't connect with the audience. But I can see absolutely that a performer's ability to kill in an average club or even their attractiveness to the entertainment powers-that-be is not necessarily measurable by the laugh meter in an Aspen club. We had a CAA agent and a William Morris agent both tell us they were at our Wednesday screening and loved the film. They were being genuine, not bullshitting us and the W.M. guy even said that ours was the one he checked off on his list, distinguishing it as the "standout" in the screening. What I learned from that was to not let a soft room or subdued response get into my head when the work has been repeatedly, conclusively proven to be good. Of course, emotional response in the moment is in the heart not in the head and so this direction to myself is easier said than done!

This being said, our second short film showing was Friday morning at 10:15 am. An early bird screening! The good thing is that the festival had really heated up and gotten into groove since Wednesday. People were hearing about things, and making a point of not missing certain shows and films they let slide the first couple of days. Our screen in the Isis Theater was packed, 200+ people. The response was great! It was up to the sunny expectations we flew into Aspen with. It's ultimately great to get validation from a couple of hard-nosed industry veterans, but there's still nothing like a huge room full of people laughing at your art. Unless your art is not supposed to be funny. But since ours is, it wasn't a problem!

I caught the end of a standup New Faces show Wednesday night in the classy Belly Up, a beautiful underground venue that resembles a slick Chicago art deco club from the golden ages of nightlife. It has different levels of seating, ample aisles and walking around space, a big comfortable wooden bar in the back and a stage that's actually lower then most of the club, but set apart visually with a kind of cabaret feel and purple and gold deco motifs behind the performers. I saw most of Mitch Fatel's set. He was pretty close to killing, given the laid-back Aspen vibe, with his semi-retarded-guy-on-muscle relaxants schtick, but I found it another amusing case of a "New Face" whose been doing standup since before the birth of many of the kids who actually WATCH TV! I saw the guy do a late night talk show standup set maybe half a decade ago, if not longer. A few of the standups in this series had been doing it 2 or 3 years. So "New Faces" is a pretty malleable term.

Wednesday night we also saw another double header of non standup performance shows. The first was a New Yorker named Eliza Coups who did a 1-person show called "The Patriots." I didn't really see what distinguished her show to the point of getting into Aspen in this highly coveted spot. It was a sampling of characters doing monologues. They seemed to have little or no through line other than they were all women. The first one was a very cliched, over-the-top drunken limousine liberal, backhandedly being racist and clueless while trying to prove her open-minded, altruistic credentials. It just seemed too broad, and too easy. Coups seemed to despise this character and so we did too, at least I did. The trick, I think, is to humanize any character to make us like something about them and show their honest point of view, even if they're badly flawed. The following characters were an Irish girl in Ireland wanting to be adpted by Americans because she loved America's slack, morally compromised culture, a Boston area townie woman shopping in a grocery store wearing a New England Patriots jacket (hence the show's name), an innocent, lovey-dovey folk songstress like Ana Gasteyer used to do on SNL and a creepy, random weirdo reading a loosely disguised anti-Bush diatribe in the form of a new-Agey poem. I couldn't even tell the geographical region or cultural touchstones that this last character eminated from. This show was fine as a MAD TV audition and Coups committed to her acting with steely determination, but how this show beat out personal, inspirational and revelatory 1-person shows that I'm sure exist out there across the country, is a complete mystery to me. Actually, it's not a mystery, it happens all too often because of the deranged, highly corrupted agendas of industry puppet-masters gone out of control.

Next up were The Whitest Kids U Know, a hot 5-man sketch group from New York City. They perform weekly at Pianos, a bar/lounge in the Lower East Side where David Cross and Todd Barry have done a popular alt-comedy show called "Tinkle." They also sometimes do shows at UCB NY and also have put a ton of content up on their website, leading to a massive amount of its. Being in a 2-year sketch group myself (Sketch Armstrong) that is pretty damn good if I say so myself (I just said it), I simply, physiologically coud not watch TWKUK without a certain amount of animalistic, mean-spirited, competetive, jealous assholery bubbling up inside and possibly dribbling onto the page. These kids have buzz and they are at Aspen, the ONLY group with more than 3 members at the festival. Here's the bottom line: They were good. They have definite strengths. There's some good things going on and thus I can say their choice to be there is not "insane", "scandalous" or "a travesty." But I was not consistently blown away nor was I envious of all their writing. They had a couple of bits with good strong, clean writing- one about a movie studio mailroom boy who energetically rattles off incredible high concept movie premises to two big executives and the other about an elementary school recess turned into an ultra-dramatic Braveheart scenario- but also some pieces that dropped the ball on the premise or just seemed weird and absurd for the sake of it and not nearly funny enogh to justify that.

It actualy bothered me that in two different sketches where one of the men in TWKUK was playing a "woman" character, the "woman" wore no wig or feminine clothes or even spoke in a noticeably high voice. They pretty much sat there in regular clothes and spoke normally. Thus, very far into one of the sketches, I honestly thought it was either about two male friends hugging passionately, or it was an explicit gay couple, but it was not until late in the sketch when the "man" character verbally defines the other as a "woman", that I even knew a major, important part of the sketch's underlying premise. I think that simple and stripped-down is cool in some aspects of live sketch, but taking it to the point where you don't put on a ten dollar wig or a frilly blouse to show that a character is female, that's just being inconsiderate of the audience, I believe, and seriously decreases your effectiveness. The folks I was sitting with didn't know it was a "female" character either. So if the not having a wig at a major comedy festival for an audience of 300 is trying to be "too cool for school", it ain't cool. It's stupid.

They had some video clips interspersed on the venue monitors and a couple of the video pieces were edgy, daring and made me laugh, or come as close to laughing as I possibly could, being a momentarily petulant performer/audiencer member. One video piece was a smooth, R & B guy dancing and singing in a music video about knocking women out with roofies or a bonk on the head and then sexing them up while they're unconscious. Then other was like a promo rap video, except for Hitler, come back as a rapper. The thin, angular faced guy in the group did the unform and the litle moustache and the lyrics were pretty dead-on clever. Both of those video sketches- perhaps offensive to some- were undeniably ballsy and just funny to many. These guys are young and have pretty good energy and apparently they have a TV deal already. So while I can find faults and while I expect to be totally blown away by a group at Aspen, I could see strong elements that show these guys could be in it and doing good stuff for the long haul.

Thursday night we saw the last of our double-shows in The Tent.Up first were The Walsh Bros., Chris and Dave, two really great and highly creative guys from Boston. And I mean really from Boston, as in they grew up in the rough n' tough Irish-American part of Boston called Charlestown, which is really like a little city unto itself in some ways. Today, more than half of Charlestown is yuppie heaven with beautiful row houses and classic brick townhomes running up and down Bunker Hill, the top of which houses the famous momument, a mini version of the Washington Monument. But the Charlestown of some of the toghest urban white people you could meet north of the state of Virginia still exists in parts, with larger-than-life scrappy characters like Butchy Doe, a white gangsta about whom the Washes regaled me with a story last time I was in Boston. Butchy has been shot more times than 50 Cent and once, when he happened to be stopped by the cops after he had been shot several times by an adversary, he told those cops, blood gushing out of his fresh bullet wounds, "Shit, was I shot? Didn't even notice." He then went on to plead ignorance about who had shot him, so strong was the sacred "Code of Silence" in that neighborhood.

The Walshes fall in an interesting, strange place in Boston society. They were clearly unique anamolies growing up- creative, bookish, eccentric, relatively non-violent weirdos to the nearby hardcore tough kids, some of whom would go on to successful careers in larceny, burglary and assault. Yet to the accentless plush suburbanites and Harvard Square Cambridge lefty, intellectual crowd, they were honest-to-goodness, unassuming sons of the working class with genuine Boston street cred.

I've gotten to know the Walshes a bit on visits back to Boston (my hometown) the past several years and have done shows with them there and in Vermont. They kind of transcend the traditional paradigms and that is a great part of what makes them so compelling on stage. They are kids who grew up in a real insular, working class, hockey and Bud part of town, but who have nothing to do with broad, easy tits n' strippers, meat n' potatoes mainstream club comedy. They are comedic explorers, like two modern Jack Kerouacs of laughter who weave the most real, honest oddball stories - mostly about Boston fringe characters- with a well crafted but still likably shaggy two-man delivery- without looking like art-rock ubergeeks or professorial hipsters. Chris and Dave don't wear the thick black-framed glasses or the ironic bowling jacket or the cool spikey hair with the carefully cultivated beardlet and burns. They look like the two guys who might deliver your pizza somewhere in the Northeast. If it took two guys to deliver a pizza, and if those pizza guys told you a captivating, brilliantly tangential yet sequential and goddamn hilarious story while delivering the pie!

The two things in their Aspen half hour that killed me were the dramatic opening where Dave is a master magician with cape and gloved, doing amazing "tricks" with Chris helping him, and their long, building story about the guy in front of Boston City Hall they spotted at 2 in the morning...sitting on a publich bench...furiously jerking off. Trust me, this story is not your typical "jerking off" piece. It plays more like a brilliant Garrison Keillor episode played at triple speed, uncensored, and performed by John Leguizamo and Dennis Leary.

After the Walsh Bros. came the strongest sketch group I saw at the festival and maybe the last several years. "Crime Scenes" was a show, not really a named group, per se, but it's 3 guys based in L.A., all veteran sketch/improv guys and this thing kicked some ASS. In addition to the 3 actors, there was a separate writer/director behind it. The premise was simply several sketches all based around cliched cop situations found in TV and movies. The writing was super-tight and was funny in that way that actually SURPRISES you in places.

The first sketch was an absurd twist about three cops at a crime scene and one of them claims he's never heard of Seinfeld, baseball or World War II, but then casually mentions references or behaves in a manner that shows he must be lying, which drives one of the other cops bonkers. Another great sketch was a parody of the classic cop movie scenario where the harried, borderline-stomach-ulcer captain or mayor screams bloody murder at the lone wolf "rebel" cop who destroys property and rules getting the bad guys, but ultimately keeps getting a free ride and total autonomy from his angry superior. The acting was awesome and 2 of the 3 guys showed electric energy throughout the show, while the 3rd guy's lower energy worked as a counterpoint to the 2 guys who were always on fire, making great faces, executing precise physical movements, screaming, and hitting certain archetypal cop-show character voices dead on. In a show like this, high powered, in-your-face energy can really work and be a huge asset, and these guts hit the ball far out of the park. Catch this show in L.A. or wherever they may happen to play!